Wander with James Alfred Turner Traditional Cache

A lovely walking trail through the Eastfield Park will take you to fair amount of equipment which is spread out. Main structure has good sized dual slides, climber with semi-circles, chain bridge, chain traverse, monkey bars and tic-tac-toe. 

To find this cache you will be walking along the J A Turner Artist Trail in Eastfield Park.
James Alfred Turner was an Australian painter. Turner recorded in painstaking detail the life and daily pursuits of the small rural settler in the mountain ranges to the north and north east of Melbourne, the capital of the State of Victoria, Australia. At the time this was "Battlers Country", life was hard and pleasures simple.

Photography was alive and well in Turners time, yet no camera could have captured the spirit of an age and lifestyle like he did. He painted in great detail and his pictures provide vibrant studies of daily life. He should be studied and valued for this skill alone. This was his great unrecognised contribution to Australian art.

Turner was quite prolific and his style instantly recognisable. Like S._T._Gil who became famous for his paintings of life on the Victorian Goldfields Turner seems to have set out to record a specific facet of Victorian life. He painted mainly rural scenes and recorded faithfully the typical rural "situations" of the day. He signed almost all his paintings J.A.Turner or in the case of small works J.A.T.

Turner died back in 1908 and from this distance he needs to be viewed in a new light. Art contemporaries and critics of the time were not kind. He was referred to, by some, as an illustrator. His critical contemporaries, so obsessed by the impressionist "flavour of the day" looked only at his style as an artist and missed totally what he was trying to achieve - a unique window on Australian pioneering history.

His obituary (The Argus (Melbourne) 16 April 1908 page 7) states … "Victoria loses an artist who not only understood and appreciated the beauty of the bush, but could depict faithfully its life and character. He was, as a rule, content with small canvasses, homely incidents and quiet aspects of nature. At times he was exceedingly happy in his landscapes and would often touch a very high if not inspired note. No man ever painted the realisms of a forest fire and its fighting better than he, or with more absolute truth. He was a very conscientious man, painting chiefly to please himself, without any suspicion of pot-boiling, never allowing work to leave his hands until he was thoroughly satisfied."

You will be looking for a micro cache which is slightly out of place for it's surrounds.